


Accretion

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 21:04:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3425540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Accretion (n) (<i>ASTRONOMY</i>)<br/>the coming together and cohesion of matter under the influence of gravitation.</p><p>Getting to know New Shepard is like navigating a once-familiar landscape that's been decimated by war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm uploading a bunch of works-in-progress that may or may not ever be finished. I write bits here and there as I find time, but these rough chapters are my poor thanks to the fandoms I love. :-)
> 
> Warning: I may move chapters around as I add more scenes, or find scenes I've already written. (Between work and our remodeling project, sometimes I forget I've tucked a chapter into an untitled email. Oops.)
> 
> This a great messy work in progress. So sorry for the dust!

**Now**

Years later, when the mass relays are repaired and the dead have been buried, when the civilizations destroyed have been mostly rebuilt, he still remembers. Alla is beside him, her hand tight in his own, but the memories come flooding back without remorse. He’s distant these days, moreso even than when they first met in the refugee camp back on Syglar; he’s willingly undergone the testing for Corpalis, but the problem isn’t a lack of memory, it’s too many memories, so many it’s hard to sift through to find the present. He thinks of Thane, of his lapses into recall, and he understands. Time is not a linear thing anymore; it’s a cloth, woven though warp and weft with visions and images of days gone past, and the older he gets, the larger and more voluminous the cloth becomes. He spends more time than he should wrapped in its warmth. Alla is much too kind, and lets him be.

Alla deserves better than Garrus; this is simple fact. Before the war, he’d never have had a chance with a woman like her, but it’s not before the war, and there are too few turians left for either of them to be choosy. Alla and Sol get along surprisingly well – better even than he and Alla get along themselves, really – and sometimes he thinks that she really married him for his sister’s company. He doesn’t mind; it’s perhaps the best company he can offer. 

Shepard is the most popular baby name in the galaxy; the fact that “Garrus” is a distant second doesn’t escape his notice. A whole generation of children bear her name. She’s the center of no less than five new religions, at least twelve epic romances, two video games, seven pornographies (that he knows of, not that he could stomach to look) and countless books. It’s a small comfort that’s she’s not here to bear witness to her own fame; she would have found the attention utterly unbearable.


	2. Chapter 2

**Then**

She's different than he remembers. 

At first, Garrus chalks it up to the painkillers, but as he weans himself off, the nagging otherness remains, rising above the dull throb of what's left of his jaw. He tells himself it's the result of idol-worship, the haze of grief distorting his memories, but he's a practical man - a romantic, true, an idealist, yes, but at the end of the day, he's still built himself in his father's image, steadfast and pragmatic. He's got a very good memory, and there's just something...off. 

Shepard is alive. She stands upright and walks among the crew, sticking her nose into everyone else's business and mulishly prodding at everything she can reach. She asks too many questions - somehow, he'd forgotten about that, her habit of questioning everyone and everything until she's reached some indeterminate, unshared conclusion. She is fierce and glowering and achingly familiar...and yet, not. He can't scratch a talon on it, but it's there, like an itch between his shoulder plates that he can't quite reach. 

He's also C-Sec down to his bones, no matter how he chafed at the regulations, so he does what he does best: he watches. And waits. 

He's been on the new Normandy a week – functional despite the haze of grief and dextro opiates – and he's standing in the main battery when it hits him. She's on the floor to his right, awkwardly sprawled half-under a console as she tinkers with something. The access plate is carefully balanced on her torso, every breath gently rocking a handful of screws that loll back and forth on its smooth metal surface. She's been in here quite a bit over the last few days, more than he would have guessed necessary for the newly-minted commander of a newly-minted vessel. More than she should be, perhaps. 

"You don't have to do that, you know," he says. 

Carefully enunciating around the screwdriver clenched in her teeth, she retorts, "You're not the only one who can calibrate a guidance system."

"On this ship? Hardly. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there are no less than four well-qualified technicians twiddling their thumbs upstairs, just dying to get neck-deep in...whatever it is...that you're doing."

There's a moment of silence. One of the screws makes a quiet _ting_ as it rolls into the beveled edge of the access plate. 

"Not that you're not welcome, of course," he adds hastily. "But I just can't shake this nagging sense that our commander may be avoiding her crew."

She slowly extricates herself from the console, and for a brief instant there's a bit of the old Shepard shining from behind her cybernetic eyes, beneath the red webbing of scars. Before he can blink, it's gone, replaced by the ominously distant, blank facade he's coming to recognize as New Shepard. "Don't be ridiculous," New Shepard says lightly. "I have to know the guts of this ship as well as the old Normandy, don't I?" 

But he notices after that she stops coming into the main battery unless there's something specific on her mind; he wants to hate her for it, but he’s poor company himself these days, and he can’t blame her for wanting to hide.


	3. Chapter 3

Getting to know New Shepard is like navigating a once-familiar landscape that's been decimated by war. Landmarks he wants to rely on are no longer there. He spins around her like an untethered compass, his ancestors' north sense deep in his bones but completely useless. Even her face is a metaphor of her resurrection: the well-earned battlescars gone, replaced with pale, tender flesh that splits and bleeds atop a faintly glowing cybernetic framework. She is simultaneously tougher and more fragile, and the incongruity grates at him. Garrus hates New Shepard, hates her for not being Old Shepard, and then mentally flogs himself for being anything less than abjectly grateful there's a Shepard returned to this universe at all. He wants to pummel her, to strip away the wires and poorly-healing skin, to tear away everything that is New Shepard until only Old Shepard stands in front of him, deadly, resplendent and utterly beloved. 

In those moments, he has to remind himself that she is a chimaera, that there is no clear delineation between Old and New, and taking a deep breath he unclenches his fists. His talons have left deep scratch marks in the console, raked over previous gouges. Old or New, regardless of scars, she is still Commander Shepard, her brilliance as unwavering as a sun, and he is her soldier, willingly caught in her gravity. She is Trebia incarnate, and he is Palaven; she is relentless and unforgiving, but without her, he is a lifeless, barren rock. He's all too familiar with the yawning darkness of her absence. As long as she breathes, his place is by her side. The certainty of it warms his craw. Butler, Weaver, Erash, the others…he burns to avenge them, but until Sidonis crawls out of whatever fecal heap he’s hiding in, Garrus still has somewhere to be.


	4. Chapter 4

There is no force in the universe greater than Shepard on a mission. Garrus knows this and trusts this like he trusts putting one foot in front of the other will get him where he wants to go. A pissed-off Shepard indentured to former enemies with opaque motives - well, now that's a thing of beauty, once he swallows away the bitter indignity of it. Every time she goes crest-to-crest with Miranda, it's only the residual stiffness in his mandibles that keeps him from betraying his delight. It's sadistic, he knows; if he were a better turian, he wouldn't wish that sort of hurricane on anyone, but then, he's not a better turian, so he makes a point to be lurking in the area if Shepard's on the warpath. He’s pleased to know she’s still much like stubborn, fearless soul he met three years ago on the Citadel, so he lets her snipe at Miranda, and says nothing. 

Not that he could stop her even if he wanted to. If Old Shepard was a slow, predictable burn, New Shepard is a raging firestorm, prone to ebbs and flares from a wind Garrus can't feel. He's used to being her meteorologist, to knowing what makes her tick, but New Shepard is a different beast. She can seem calm and authoritative, a carbon copy of her old self, but he senses there's so much more swirling beneath the surface. She keeps it locked down, but there are moments it bursts forth in an acerbic comment or stubborn twitch in her jaw, and he sees that she's really a barely-contained coronal ejection, superheated molecules spinning and colliding, the glow of it emanating from the slices in her skin. She is a storm flaying her body from the inside out, and she's not healing well, and all of it worries him. 

His face is being held together with bone glue and gauze, and he's already back to eating solid food. He's scarred, but functional. Then there's Shepard. He supposes it's a little easier to recover from a rocket to the face than it is to recover from being dead - he's no doctor, but it's a reasonable conjecture - and despite their apparent fragility, humans exhibit a remarkable capacity for survival. Even so, it's been a month, and Shepard hasn't improved. Her skin is a patchwork of lines that split without bleeding, raw and open like the gills of fish, parts of an organic being never meant to be exposed. She goes on missions, solidly carrying the weight of her duties - he could never complain about her devotion to her duty, and, well, it's Shepard, so she always carries far more than she needs to. But there's always a new slick of medigel on her skin after a firefight, and it never seems to take. He has no idea what human immune systems are like, but if she were turian, that many open wounds would be vulnerable to infection and parasites. She's so soft and fleshy; she has no one to groom the nits from her crest, no protective carapace to ward off the sun. If she were Old Shepard, he'd haul her into Chakwas's office and tie her down until those bleak lines scab over, but she's New Shepard, she's Trebia, and as Palaven, he's hesitant to stray too close. He can't shake the sense that he's somehow failing her, that somehow he's supposed to implement the solution to a problem he can only barely discern. His failures gnaw at him – C-Sec, his team, and now Shepard - getting under his plates and burning late at night when he should be sleeping.

****

She doesn’t sleep well either, it seems. He’s caught her ranging around the ship like a caged varren in the wee hours of the watch. He doesn’t know how to talk to her, not when the air around her is thick with the choking scent of frustration. She comes into the main battery a few times, but he finds himself stammering out, “Can it wait a bit? I’m in the middle of some calibrations,” and then mentally cursing himself when she stalks away. When they get the orders for Horizon, he thinks, finally – she’ll have a chance to burn off some of the toxic energy that boils out of her.  


Even for a self-avowed pessimist, he can’t have imagined it going worse.  


Shepard fights like a wild thing, throwing herself at the enemy with a ferocity that frightens him, but, because he’s tied to her, bound by her gravity, he finds himself lurching headlong into battle after her, every breath in his lungs burning with the cloying stench of the Collector’s swarms. He can only say a brief prayer that Mordin is as clever as advertised, because he doesn’t have time to worry about whether or not the shields are working. Every bit of his concentration is focused on Shepard, keeping her safe and not getting himself shot in the process. In the final, pitched battle, he turns to check her six just as she puts her fist straight through a Collector, punching through its skull with a nauseating pop. 

New Shepard scares the shit out of him. 

Despite their efforts, the Collectors get away, and despite his desperate attempts at mediation, he can’t manage to keep the magically-appeared Lieutenant Alenko from accusing Shepard of treason. Maybe this is why the Alliance doesn’t permit fraternization, Garrus thinks, not because it’s bad for morale, but because its ranks are populated with blunt-toothed, clawless _nerik_. Alenko is a strong fighter, but the words he flings at Shepard, dripping with contempt, are unforgivable: “You betrayed the Alliance! You betrayed _me_."

The way he says it makes it sound like all of this - from Shepard’s death to her unlikely resurrection to her indentured servitude to Cerberus - is just an elaborate plot to deceive one Kaidan Alenko. In this moment, Garrus hates Alenko even more than he hates Sidonis, even more than he hates the Collectors, even more than he hates the Reapers. A quick glance at Shepard pulls at his heart-tendons, because everything he feels is nothing but a pale shadow of the pain in her face. She’s still flooded with bloodlust and medigel, rivulets of blood running down her nose from a split scar on her forehead, and for one furious, lightheaded moment, Garrus is positive that Alenko is a dead man. But somehow, Alenko walks away, leaving Shepard iron-jawed and shaking with rage in his wake. 

Back on the shuttle, Garrus says, “Shepard-” 

“No.” Her voice is flat, but he can see her fists clenched against her legs. 

“I just-” 

“Shut _up_ , Vakarian.” 

He’s half a breath away from being a dead man himself, and it’s only Miranda’s questioning eyebrow that makes him press his mandibles tight against his plates in silence. Shepard is breathing like a wounded, cornered animal, the impotent fury boiling around her, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do to assuage it. When he’d first caught a whiff of Alenko’s scent intermingled with Shepard’s, he’d been concerned – bizarrely, fraternization was a punishable offense in the human military – but he’d hoped the relationship would fare better than this. He was no expert on human sexual dynamics, but they’d seemed well-matched. 

Once on the ship, Shepard disappears, and Garrus retreats into the main battery, the acid of cowardice oily and hot in his craw. His job is to watch Shepard’s six, and instead, he’d let her get taken out by friendly fire. He channels his frustration into his firing algorithms, and if he can manage to enhance the targeting resolution to a target roughly the size of a dark-haired human head, well, that benefits everyone, doesn’t it? 


	5. Chapter 5

He doesn’t see Shepard for almost a full day, and when she reappears, there are new scabs on her knuckles, and her face is carefully devoid of any emotion. She interacts pleasantly with the crew, even chuckling a bit at one of Donnelly’s incomprehensible declarations, but her eyes are flat and dead in a way that has nothing to do with cybernetics. He’d never thought he’d ache for the alien flexibility of the human face, but then again, he’d never thought he’d leave C-Sec, either. _What have I become?_ he thinks, watching New Shepard sip her coffee and pretend to be fine. _What have we both become?_

****

He hates cold, but Haestrom's brutal sun is too much even for his heat-loving body. His cooling system is set to max, but he's still panting dryly in his suit. It's a merciful relief when they have the quarian marine safely back on his ship and Tali safely back in theirs. She takes his hands in heartfelt greeting, and if he clings a little longer than he should - well, she's effervescent and forthright, her suit exhaust smelling faintly of antiseptic and ozone. Tali is unassailably herself, and she's suddenly the most steady thing a universe where everything else seems tilted off its axis. He squeezes her hands, dizzyingly grateful for her presence, and she cocks her head with concern but doesn't ask. 

Shepard is almost pleasant, for once, instead the usual post-battle grouchiness. He suspects the heat has as much to do with her relatively tractable mood as does Tali's presence; humans fare even less well in high heat than turians, and she's loose-limbed and flushed as she sprawls in the jump seat across from him. Lawson sits to her right, and he's pleased to notice even she can't avoid looking somewhat disheveled. 

Back on the Normandy, Shepard leaves to brief the Illusive Man, and he gives Tali the full tour. She's thrilled to see Joker and Chakwas, and even more impressed with the engine room than he expected. Still, once they're out of earshot of the two Cerberus engineers - who are cautiously _delighted_ to have a celebrated quarian technician in their midst - she grabs Garrus's shoulder and hisses, "What the hell is wrong with Shepard? What did they do to her?"

"I don't know," he admits, and can't keep the pained flange out of his subharmonics. "She said they rebuilt her. I don't know what that means."

"Keelah," Tali breathes. "Garrus, I was watching through the security cams. She took on a Colossus all by herself! Does she have a death wish?"

“She certainly doesn’t have a _life_ wish,” he mutters. 

“ _Garrus-_ ” she says, but then one of the Cerberus engineers is running up with a suddenly-remembered question about the efficiency of the sodium heat sinks, and he can only watch as Tali turns to continue holding court to the two besotted humans. 

****

Later, they’re sitting in the main battery, sipping at a bitter concoction - it’s oddly appropriate, for the galaxy’s worst turian to be drinking the galaxy’s worst turian brandy - when Tali says quietly, “Garrus, what if it’s because she doesn’t trust us?”

He’s far enough along his flight path to inebriation that the words take a moment to sink in. “What is the it what’s if?”

All he sees is a slight narrowing of her phosphorescent pupils behind the polarized visor, and she enunciates, “What if Shepard charged that Colossus because she did not trust anyone else to take it out for her?”

“I’ve got her back,” he says. “I’ve always got her back. She knows that.”

“Does she?”

He can’t answer that. His ruined mandible aches, and when he closes his eyes, he sees the bodies of his team laid out on the ground - Melanis, Weaver, Butler, Erash - each trusting him explicitly and each explicitly dead. He doesn’t know if Shepard trusts him to watch her six. He doesn’t know if he trusts himself to watch her six. He’s swimming in bad brandy, visions of Vortash’s pulped skull and the trail of Mierin’s blood still pumping from her stomach, and amid it all, Shepard putting her fist straight through a Collector’s head, teeth bared as she howls like an enraged varren-

“What happened to _you?_ ” Tali asks quietly. 

“Some other time,” he says, and lifts the bottle to his maw.


	6. Chapter 6

The Collector ship is too easy to get in, that much he’s sure of. It’s almost a relief when the tables are turned, and he and Shepard and Taylor are running full bore down the corridors that are shaped like intestines and reek of death, the Reapers’ grotesque puppets hounding their heels. EDI is guiding them as best she can – rationally he knows this – but he can’t help a helpless wave of frustration when yet another door slams down just as they round the corner. 

The last fifty paces are done through a swarm of husks – more than he’s ever faced in one place before. They come at him too fast for guns, and he resorts to clawing and shoving, the butt of his sniper rifle thick with the viscous dark goo that passes for husk blood. Shepard almost gleefully dances through the fray somewhere ahead of him, slashing and punching with Taylor incandescent, burning through the horde like a comet in her wake. There are so many husks – too many – and they’re all converging, pulling on his arms, claws catching on the battle scars in his suit. 

They can’t fight their way through. With a roar, he makes for the shuttle, head-butting a husk in the stomach and grabbing Shepard’s arm as he charges forward. Taylor is beside them, blue corona blazing.  


Cortez is yelling for speed as they dive through the shuttle doors, the grasping husk limbs severed as the pressure doors seal. They crash onto the deck, breathing hard and drenched in sweat and blood. Shepard is lying between them, and just as Garrus is going to ask her if she’s all right, her head lolls back and her face twists in a horrible gasping.

He’s drenched in icy fear, every plate and scale frozen into glass. He hasn’t even had her back a month, and already he’s losing her again. She’s dying in front of him – 

She’s laughing. 

Shepard is gasping for air, tears streaming down her face and blood soaking her legs from a wound she doesn’t seem to notice. He has never heard such a horrible sound, but she’s not dying, she’s _laughing_ , her whole body contorted with hilarity. 

“What’s so funny?” Taylor pauses cautiously as he opens a pack of medi-gel. His posture indicates he’s not sure whether to humor her or back away. 

“A _trap_ ,” she rasps, and dissolves again. “Of course, a fucking _trap_ …”

“It’s not funny, Shepard!” Garrus snaps, fury blooming in his craw. Either she’s in shock, or she’s completely lost touch with reality, and he can’t handle either one right now. “We could have _died_!”

“He paid two billion…” Spirits help him, she’s giggling like a child now, absently waving a bloodstained hand his direction. “And the first thing he does…is send me into a _trap_ …”

His vision hazes to blue, and he only comes back to himself when Taylor shoves him hard toward the aft of the cabin. “We need more medi-gel. She could bleed out!”

Garrus moves, but he’s so angry, angry at Shepard for being reckless, angry at Cerberus for bringing her back so ragged and wrong, angry at the Collectors for shooting her, angry at himself for not protecting her, angry at everything. And if he loses her right now…well, that’s a knife-thin edge he can’t look over. Once he goes over, he’ll just fall and fall and the odds of there being another resurrected Shepard to save him are even more laughable than the Illusive Man’s hubris. 

Somehow, Taylor gets her stabilized and delivers her to Chakwas’s waiting table. Garrus can’t handle it. He lets Tali drag him away from the cargo bay, gently guiding him into the elevator. “She keeps charging them,” he says, seeing only his own battered reflection in her helmet. “She can’t-”

“I know,” she says quietly. “Take a shower, and I’ll make sure there’s food ready.”

He remembers when they first met on the Citadel, when Tali was so young and fierce and strange. It’s only been three years, but somehow, she’s the last solid thing on this crazy twisted ship, the only person who hasn’t been corrupted by Cerberus influence. Without thinking, he bumps his forehead against hers, his crest making a dull thunk against her visor. It’s intimate - too intimate between friends, even - but he’s too worn out to be embarrassed. He’s just deeply, abjectly grateful she’s unchanged. 

If she understands the depth of the gesture, she says nothing, just chuckling a little and giving him a nudge into the elevator. “We’ll get through this,” she says, an ocean of sympathy and pragmatism in her tone. “We always do.”


End file.
